Pints With Aquinas - 132: Did Jesus really claim to be God? With Brant Pitre

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. How you going, mate? You okay? My name's Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any, this intro is sliding out of control, trying to regain focus. Any one question, what would it be? Today, guess who's joining us around the bar table? That's right, Dr. Brant Petrie.

Starting point is 00:00:25 We're going to discuss two primary questions. Are the New Testament documents reliable? And did Jesus really claim to be God? Good to have you back here at Pines with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. This entire month, the month of November, we are running a special promotion

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Starting point is 00:02:54 you've sold it for $10,000 more secretly and put it on your new one to increase the value of that. I'm just saying that's an option. Okay. But again, pintswithacornets.com, click donate, give me $10 or more a month, you'll get all of that stuff, and you'll be in the running to win one of these three, five-volume sets of the Summa Theologiae, which is a really cool thing. So, we're going to talk about New Testament, and what's interesting is this whole question of the historicity or the reliability of the gospels is something that's being discussed more and more these days, but it wasn't really discussed in the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.

Starting point is 00:03:34 And so for that reason, you don't see Aquinas making arguments for the reliability of, say, the gospel of Luke or Acts or something like that. So, we can't actually read Thomas Aquinas' opinion on this because he, as far as I'm aware, didn't give it. But there is a really interesting article that kind of concerns Christ's doctrine, and I want to read from this before we have Dr. Brant Petrie come on. This comes from the third part of the Summa Theologiae, Dr. Brant Petrie come on. This comes from the third part of the Summa Theologiae, question four. So the Tertia Pars question four, article four. And Aquinas addresses this question. Should Jesus have also written stuff down? Like he only preached, why didn't he write anything? It seems like he should have written something. And you can go read the objections and the responses for yourself. But I just thought before we have Dr. Brant Petrie come

Starting point is 00:04:30 on, I would share with you the three reasons Aquinas gives for why Christ didn't write anything. Okay. So he says, it was fitting that Christ should not commit his doctrine to writing. It was fitting that Christ should not commit his doctrine to writing first on account of his dignity for the more excellent the teacher, the more excellent should be his manner of teaching. Consequently, it was fitting that Christ, as the most excellent of teachers, should adopt the manner of teaching whereby his doctrine is imprinted on the hearts of his hearers. Wherefore, it is written in Matthew 7, 29 that, quote, he was teaching them as one having power, end quote. And so it was among the Gentiles, says Aquinas, Pythagoras and Socrates. These were teachers of great excellence, but were unwilling to write anything. Aquinas says, for writings are ordained as to an end. What is that end? Aquinas says, imprinting of doctrine in the hearts of the hearers.

Starting point is 00:05:32 So this is the first point Aquinas is basically saying, I suppose, that writing is sort of like a middleman and Aquinas didn't need that because he was so excellent a teacher. The second reason Aquinas gives is on account of the excellence of Christ's doctrine. Okay. So the first reason is that he's a great teacher. The second has to do with his doctrine. Aquinas says this doctrine can't be expressed in writing. And so we read in John 21, 25, there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written, everyone, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written. And Augustine explains saying, quote, we are not to believe that in respect of space,

Starting point is 00:06:18 the world could not contain them. All right. So it's not like, you know, sometimes you read that and you think, okay, so I guess like there wouldn't have been enough room to fit all the books. Is that what he's saying? And Augustine says, no, no, no, that's, that's not what he's saying. What he's saying is by the capacity of the readers, they wouldn't be able to comprehend it. So that, that's what, that's what Augustine takes that passage to be. So again, that quote from Augustine is, we're not to believe that in respect of space, the world could not contain them, but that by the capacity of the readers, they could not be comprehended. That's the quote. And then Aquinas says, and if Christ had committed his doctrine to writing, men would have had no

Starting point is 00:07:01 deeper thought of his doctrine than that which appears on the surface of the writing. Now, according to tradition, there are two senses of scripture, and this is something the catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, right? You've got the literal and the spiritual. So, the literal sense is just the meaning conveyed by the author of scripture, and this is something we discover by what's called exegesis, which means to sort of take out. So all the other senses of the Bible, of sacred scripture are based on this literal sense. So then you have the spiritual sense, and this can be divided into like three different categories. You have the allegorical sense, the spiritual sense, and this can be divided into like three different categories.

Starting point is 00:07:46 You have the allegorical sense, the moral sense, and the anagogical sense. And so that's why, and I'll go over them briefly, but that's why when we read sacred scripture, we can read more into it. So for example, the allegorical sense has to do with typology. So there were certain things that took place in the Old Testament, which foreshadowed greater things in the new. And so that's the allegorical sense. So for example, the crossing of the Red Sea is a type of baptism, right? So in the second spiritual sense would be the moral sense. The events that Scripture talks about lead us to act rightly. And that's why Paul says that they were written for our instruction. And then you've got the anagogical sense. And the catechism

Starting point is 00:08:32 here says we can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us towards our true homeland. All right. So there's different senses in which we read sacred scripture. And Aquinas seems to be saying that if Christ were to have taught us through writing, we wouldn't try and derive any other sense out of what he was writing. And so for that reason, his writing. And so for that reason, he taught us orally. The third reason is that his doctrine might reach all in an orderly manner, himself teaching his disciples immediately, and they subsequently teaching others by preaching and writing. Whereas if he himself had written, his doctrine would have reached all immediately. Now, I just want to say something here. I'm totally willing to be wrong on this point, but it does seem a little ad hoc, like how Aquinas is

Starting point is 00:09:31 arguing here. An ad hoc argument is where you explain something after the fact, right? Because let's be honest, like if Christ had written something down and we all accepted it as scripture, obviously Aquinas would have written an article about why it was profitable that Christ wrote. And he probably would have said something like, because he was such a great writer, he did this. And, you know, so it is a little ad hoc, but I think one of the great things about Thomas Aquinas is he bends his, now you could take this the wrong way, but try not to. He bends his philosophies or ways of thinking to divine revelation, not the other way around. We tend to do it the other way around.

Starting point is 00:10:12 We come at scripture with these preconceived ideas about what's moral and immoral. And if scripture doesn't meet us at our expectations, we'll twist scripture so that it meets us, you know? So if you want to say something like contraception is moral, because how couldn't it be? And then you read different passages in sacred scripture that seem to condemn contraception, right? Well, you'll have to reinterpret the scripture. Like you'll have to bend divine revelation to what you held beforehand. Whereas what Aquinas does is no matter what he thinks, you know, it's divine revelation that everything must be subordinate to. It's the holy word of God that everything must be subordinate to. And so for that reason, Aquinas gives us those

Starting point is 00:10:58 three reasons as to why Christ should not have or did not have to commit his doctrine to writing. All right, so I hope that was interesting. Here we go with the interview with Dr. Bram Petrie. Dr. Petrie, thanks for being on Pints with Aquinas. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. It's great to be here. Yeah, now Aquinas didn't really address the historicity of the New Testament, unless I'm totally mistaken. When did this become a thing?

Starting point is 00:11:27 Yeah, no, that's a great question. You know, I was actually thinking about that, given the title of the podcast being Pints with Aquinas. I was looking through some of his commentaries, because he did write commentaries on both the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Matthew. And if you look through them, he just doesn't deal with the question of the historicity of either gospel, because in the Middle Ages, this wasn't a thing, as you put it, because the gospels up to the time of Aquinas had always been treated as four ancient biographies written either by eyewitnesses, like in the case of Matthew and John, or by the companions of apostles,

Starting point is 00:12:06 like in the case of Luke or Mark. So there just wasn't any question about the historical origins of the gospel or the authenticity or the reliability. Those were kind of settled issues. So he doesn't really address them. It really is in the wake of the Reformation, especially after the Enlightenment, really kicking off in the 18th and 19th centuries, that in European circles and Protestant circles, especially where deism was on the rise, the idea of God as a kind of distant watchmaker who doesn't actually act in the world, doubts about the possibility of miracles and revelation. Once those things came onto the scene, especially in the 19th century, scholars began to register doubts about not just the truth of this or that doctrine

Starting point is 00:12:53 of Christianity, but whether the foundational documents, the Gospels themselves, were in fact as reliable as they'd always been thought to be in the tradition. Yeah. I just spent the last month, I took a month off the internet in August. It was incredible. And I got to read your excellent book on Jesus and it was just terrific. I'm so glad you're doing the work that you're doing. Yeah. Well, you're talking about the case for Jesus. Yeah. The case for Jesus. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, thanks, man. I appreciate that. Yeah. The reason I wrote that book is because of my own experience of having grown up a Catholic who believed the gospels, who opened up, you know, the gospels and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I just assumed they were

Starting point is 00:13:34 written by, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And that, you know, gave me a substantially reliable accounts of what Jesus said and did. And then I went off to college and I still remember in my classroom, one of the first things my introduction to the New Testament class said at an undergraduate university, the professor walked in and said, I want you to forget everything you ever thought you knew about the gospels, especially regarding who wrote them. I know your Bibles have titles, you know, gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but scholars today know that the Gospels were in fact originally anonymous, that they circulated without any titles for over a hundred years, and that those names, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were added to them over a

Starting point is 00:14:18 century later just to give them authority in a kind of act of what amounts to basically forgery or what scholars call pseudonymity, just meaning a false name. And I remember being kind of taken aback by that because I'd never heard that as a young Catholic growing up. And we proceeded to study the New Testament in that way with the idea that the gospels are not, you know, based on eyewitness testimony, but that they're rather the end result of a long chain of anonymous storytellers, almost akin to the children's game, the telephone game. I don't know if you ever played the telephone game. We called it Chinese Whispers in Australia, which I'm sure is racially insensitive to somebody.

Starting point is 00:15:00 I think it is in fact the case. I think in England and Australia, that's the name. But in the States, we are in this case, we're actually more sensitive than politically correct. Yes. More politically correct. It's called the telephone game. And the idea is that, you know, once one, you know, you sit around a circle and one kid tells a story to the other kid who tells it to another, to another, to another. kid who tells it to another, to another, to another, until after it goes through the circle at the end of the chain, the story is completely distorted and everyone gets a good laugh out of it. Well, that is the analogy that my professor and many professors used in class to help us,

Starting point is 00:15:38 quote unquote, understand how the stories about Jesus in the Gospels actually came to be. They were the long process of anonymous traditions and storytellers, something akin to an ancient version of the telephone game. Now, if you take that seriously, if that's the way you think about the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, it fundamentally alters your trust in the Gospels because the whole point of the telephone game is that at the end of the chain uh you get a distortion you get something that's not reliable um and that's precisely how almost a century now of students at universities have been trained to

Starting point is 00:16:20 approach the gospels not as eyewitness testimony, but as, you know, the end product of a game of telephone. Right. And so then Lewis's trilemma, the idea that you have to accept him either as Lord or a liar or a lunatic doesn't work because there's a fourth option. Jesus might just be a legend or if not a legend entirely, maybe all sorts of fictitious stories were inserted into the Gospels, and they're just fundamentally unreliable. Yeah, so what happens is – I'm glad you brought up C.S. Lewis because I remember reading his book Mere Christianity when I was in college. It was an awesome book. One of his main arguments for why he became a Christian was this trilemma of if you look at the Gospels, Jesus claims to be divine, and so he only leaves us three options. He's either a liar who knew he wasn't God and claimed to be, which is a big lie, or he was a lunatic who thought he was God but wasn't in fact God, which is a serious

Starting point is 00:17:15 misapprehension of one's own identity, right? I love Lewis says it's like a man who calls himself a poached egg. I love that. It's such a great example. It is a great example, except that there's actually more difference between us and God than between us and a poached egg. I mean, this is infinite distance, right? So he'd be even more crazy than someone who thought he was an egg. And then the third example is, of course, Lord, Lewis says, look, the other option is that he was who he claimed to be. He was the Lord come in person. And so Lewis thought that was the only reasonable approach to the data, to the evidence in the Gospels. Now, he put that argument out in the 50s when this kind of skepticism toward the authorship and reliability of the Gospels

Starting point is 00:17:55 had not quite taken on as firm a hold in popular culture as it has today. It was still kind of limited to the ivory towers of Europe and whatnot. And so what happens is, though, by the time you get to my generation, so I'm going to university in the 90s, those three options are out the window because there's a fourth alternative, which is that not that Jesus himself is a legend. You're correct. Most New Testament scholars, even atheists and secular scholars, do not think that Jesus himself was a legend. You're correct. Most New Testament scholars, even atheists and secular scholars, do not think that Jesus himself was a legend. What they will say, however, though, is that the passages in which Jesus claims to be divine, like in the Gospel of John, chapter 8, where Jesus says, you know, before Abraham was, I am, taking the divine name. Or in John chapter 10, where Jesus

Starting point is 00:18:42 says, I and the Father are one, right? And they stone him for claiming to be, or in John chapter 10, where Jesus says, I and the father are one, right? And they stone him for claiming to be, or they pick up stones in order to attempt to stone him for claiming to be God. What they'll say is, oh, well, those passages are legendary. What they'll say is that Jesus only claims to be divine in the gospel of John. And that was the last one to be written. So what they'll say is that the divine claims are legendary claims, that Jesus only claims to be God in one out of the four gospels, and therefore Lewis's trilemma doesn't work anymore. It basically pulls the rug out from underneath that because the gospels themselves aren't reliable when it comes to Jesus's self claims. And that, that, that idea

Starting point is 00:19:25 really rocked me. It really, yeah, that's what I was about to ask you. So you're at college, you hear this idea. Did you try and tell yourself, okay, so they weren't written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, maybe, but Hey, I mean, we can still make this work. Or the more you thought about it, we like, no, no, this is just a house built on sand. If, if the gospel is unreliable. I think it was more like a, uh, like a house built on sand that slowly ghost was unreliable. Yeah. I think it was more like a house built on sand that slowly fell apart. It wasn't, I mean, I was an undergraduate. When you're an undergraduate, you don't know anything and you know you don't know anything. So you just take the professor's word for it, right? So I kind of, you know, tucked away the idea that they weren't actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I thought, oh, I didn't know that. I

Starting point is 00:20:01 learned something new today. But the implications of that kind of gradually dawned on me as I realized more and more, wait, if I can't trust what they say about this, what about other things? And eventually it really brought me to a crisis of faith because I looked at the, for example, I looked at Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and sure enough, I never, I couldn't find a passage where Jesus says, I am God, right? You know, it wasn't there. He doesn't go around the streets of Galilee saying, hey, everybody, I'm the second person of the Trinity. You know, he doesn't explicitly declare his divinity in those first three gospels. Sorry to interject here, but you know, it's funny, like sometimes people will say, you know, you look at the gospels, nowhere does he say that he's God. But suppose there was such a verse, and Jesus proclaimed, I am God. It's not, like sometimes people will say, you know, you look at the Gospels, nowhere does he say that he's God. But suppose there was such a verse, and Jesus proclaimed, I am God.

Starting point is 00:20:47 It's not like that person would be like, ah, okay, yeah, okay, cool then, he's God. No, no, to the contrary. I mean, they would probably just say that's precisely an example of one of the legends. Because that's what they do with the Gospel of John. We have very explicit testimonies I just mentioned in John 8 and 10. And yet scholars say, well, that's a later Gospel. It wasn't written by an eyewitness. It's a reflection of Christian belief and not of history. So that kind of, it's a kind of like hermeneutic and interpretive approach of skepticism

Starting point is 00:21:17 where you approach the gospels and your posture is not one of trust, but one of doubt, right? Where it's like the gospels are guilty until proven innocent. It's a lot easier. This is more of a psychological point, but it's a lot easier to be skeptical than to have trust, isn't it? Especially when you've lived a bit and you've been hurt and betrayed. Yeah, no, that's true. It's a lot easier to make a case than to tear something down. Oh, sorry. It's a lot easier to tear something down than to make a case. To make a case. Yeah. And that's why children tend to be more trustful than adults, right? Because as you've had your trust abused, you can develop a kind of hardened heart toward things.

Starting point is 00:21:51 And it is harder to build a positive case because you have to really go back and look at the evidence. You have to ask yourself, what is the data? Is it reliable? When was it written? How was it written? Who was it written by? What's the genre of the Gospels? And those things, those questions take time and thought and research and reflection.

Starting point is 00:22:10 And that's one of the reasons why eventually I end up putting it all together in a book. Which everyone's going to get because it's bloody fantastic. Thank you. I appreciate that. I wanted to ask you this first point about the Gospels, whether they're anonymous or not. Would you mind for us steelmanning Bart Ehrman's position as to why the Gospels are anonymous and then in good Thomistic fashion show why he's wrong? Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. I'd be happy to do that. Okay, so basically, let me say who Bart Ehrman is for just a second. So Bart Ehrman is a, uh, he's, he, he's a former Christian. He is now an atheist. Uh, but he was

Starting point is 00:22:53 an evangelical Protestant Christian, uh, in his younger days who, um, earned a PhD in new Testament. He teaches new Testament studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's authored dozens and dozens of books. And he, on several books, has made a very strong case for the anonymity of the Gospels, the theory that the Gospels were originally anonymous and that the titles are added later. This isn't exclusive to him. Other scholars have it. But he's probably the most widely known and most forceful of its advocates. So basically, the theory boils down to about three or four main points. Number one, according to Ehrman, all four Gospels were originally published without any titles or headings saying, according to Matthew or according to Mark, according to Luke. They were just blanks at

Starting point is 00:23:40 the beginning of the books. And then second, all these books supposedly circulated, and I mean, they were copied without any titles for almost a hundred years before they got added to them. And people started saying, oh, this was written by Matthew, and this was written Mark, and this was written by Luke, and this was written by John, in order to give them much needed authority. That's Ehrman's case, is that the titles are added a century later, long after the apostles are dead and buried, just to give them authority. And then finally, the upshot of the theory is that because they were all originally anonymous, it's reasonable to conclude that none of them was actually written by an eyewitness, all right? So what these are, are the Gospels are collections of stories about Jesus by people who we have no idea whether they actually ever saw Jesus, knew Jesus, witnessed what he did or not.

Starting point is 00:24:32 Right. What's the argument, though? I mean, how does he know they were anonymous? What's the argument there? Well, that's a very interesting question, isn't it? Oftentimes, the anonymity of the Gospels is just asserted. It's not argued. In part, what they'll say is scholars today know this because it's basically one scholar citing another scholar citing another scholar. It goes back to the end of the 19th century. Let me just back up for just a second. second. Um, in the end of the 19th century, the, the theory of anonymity arose from, um, scholar, a scholar named Adolph von Harnack. He was one of the most popular ones who basically at the time, all they had were copies of the gospels known as codices. Uh, these are, uh, fourth, fifth century copies, uh, in book form. And he, what Harnack argued was that if you look at the titles, they all say gospel according to Mark. In other words, they presuppose kind of one gospel according to different authors. And what Harnack argued, he didn't have any evidence. He basically just said, well, that kind of idea of a unified gospel didn't arise until the second century. So these titles

Starting point is 00:25:41 must have arisen in the second century. It's really that weak, Matt. And what happens is though, a second thing, the idea that the gospels were folklore and not biographies began to catch on because the gospels were so full of miracle stories, that some fantastic things like a man walking on water, a dead person being raised. And so what scholars said was, oh, well, if the gospels are folklore, then these titles can't be original because folklore by definition is usually anonymous. It's not the, yeah, right? I mean, Grimm's fairy tales, pick any one of those tales from Germany. Well, who originally wrote the tales? Well, no one knows because they're the

Starting point is 00:26:20 long, they're the end products of a long process of oral tradition. We don't know who wrote the three little pigs, for example, right? So what happened was the, the, the approach to the gospels genre changed. And also this theory was basically, it was, I hate to just say it so bluntly, but they made it up. There isn't any evidence for the anonymity. That's the point, right? Um, and so what happens is fast forward to the end of the 20th century, this idea has become so ingrained in scholarship that it just gets repeated as if it's a fact, when in fact, it's not a fact. It's just a theory, okay? And what also happened is we've discovered a lot more ancient Greek fragments called papyri that were older than the codices that Harnack were using at the end of the 19th century, than those scholars.

Starting point is 00:27:05 And so we know now that, in fact, the earliest copies of the Gospels we have also have the titles. Originally, the theory was if we could find these older papyri, they would be anonymous. We just don't have them. Well, that's all been blown out of the water by more recent archaeological discoveries. So what's happening is, in effect, scholars like Ehrman are continuing to repeat a theory that is over 100 years old, but that has, in fact, been disproved by the actual data. Okay, does that make any sense at all? It makes a lot of sense. Let me just ask a question, kind of point blank for those who may not be following. How many gospels do we have from antiquity that are anonymous? Precisely zero. Okay. So, okay. This is really

Starting point is 00:27:48 important. This is incredible. This is incredible. We have zero. And are there people, are there speaking people from antiquity addressing anonymous gospels? Like, no, right. So we have no evidence for it. Yes. We have neither internal nor external evidence. In other words, one of the things I do in the case for Jesus is I have a, I have a chart in the case for Jesus of just all the earliest manuscripts of the gospel titles and how we have them for every single one, and we don't have any anonymous copies. That's actually what blew me away was the lack of internal evidence. So whenever you're trying to figure out who wrote a book, there's two ways to look at it, right? You look at internal evidence. In other words, you open the book itself and see, well, wait, who does it say it was written by?

Starting point is 00:28:30 But then you can also look at external evidence, people who lived around the time of the book. So, for example, Pope Benedict, he wrote a book on Jesus, right? Remember that a few years back? Yep. Great book. Great trilogy. If someone said, well, how do I know the Pope wrote it? Well, there's two ways to know. You can look inside the book and it says Pope Benedict XVI. That'd be called internal evidence.

Starting point is 00:28:52 It's the evidence of the title. But a second way would be to ask, hey, does anybody who know the Pope or who was alive at the time, do they say he wrote a book on Jesus? So if you interviewed his chief secretary or his brother, Georg Ratzinger, and said, hey, did your brother write a book? They would tell you, yes. That would be called external evidence. So the crazy thing, Matt, is when you look at the Gospels and you go back to the first and second centuries and you ask, what does the internal evidence say from the manuscripts? What does the internal evidence say from the main scripts? And what does the external evidence say from the apostolic fathers, people who either knew the gospel authors or who were around very close to them in proximity?

Starting point is 00:29:33 The evidence is unanimous, both internal and external. All of our copies of the gospels that we have titles or endings for attributed them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's completely unanimous. There are zero anonymous copies. And then also when we turn to the external evidence, the ancient church fathers, such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Eusebius, Jerome, all those ancient writers, they all are completely unanimous that the four gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Starting point is 00:30:08 So in other words, external and internal evidence is completely unanimous. Evidence for anonymity is completely non-existent. So this really is what I would technically call it a myth. A myth is a story of origins that has no basis in fact. And the idea of the theory of the anonymous gospels is really a myth. It's the scholarly myth of the anonymous gospels is really a myth. It's the scholarly myth of the anonymous gospels, but it's the starting point for now, for generations of students, in particular young people, being inducted into this idea that you cannot trust the gospels, that they're not reliable witnesses to who Jesus was, what he said, and what he did, and who he claimed to be.

Starting point is 00:30:44 Yeah, I love the argument you made against this theory when you said, okay, if these things were said to have been copied anonymously for over a hundred years. Oh, yeah. Yes, talk about that. That was a great point. Yeah, well, one of the other problems with the theory is not just that there's no evidence. It's that the anonymous gospel theory is incredible. In other words, it's implausible because it asked me to believe, think about this for just a second. If it asked me to believe that not just one, not just two, but four anonymous books were copied over and over again for a hundred years. And then somehow, miraculously, a hundred years later, the exact same titles were supposedly added to not one,

Starting point is 00:31:23 not two, not three, but all four of them in all these different parts of the Roman empire. Remember by the second century AD, you've got copies of the gospels in Africa, Syria, Jerusalem, Egypt, Rome, Gaul, all across the empire. Supposedly they're anonymous for a hundred years. And yet at the end of the second century, all of these scribes across the empire just miraculously attribute every single book to the exact same person. I mean, no, that's implausible because if the gospels had circulated anonymously for a hundred years, what you would actually expect would be different attributions. In other words, there'd be discrepancies in the tradition.

Starting point is 00:32:01 Some people would attribute the same book to Matthew and to Thomas. Other people would attribute it to, you know, Luke or maybe to Paul himself. In other words, there'd be discrepancies, but that's precisely what we don't get with the gospels. And this is what we see, say, with an anonymous letter, like the letter to the Hebrews, correct? Yeah, this is really what blew me away. There is actually one anonymous book in the New Testament. It's the letter to the Hebrews. It doesn't have a name in the book, and it doesn't have a title telling you who wrote it. And guess what happened in the tradition with Hebrews? People ascribed it to different authors.

Starting point is 00:32:36 Some people said Paul wrote it. Some people said Luke translated it. Some people said it was written by Barnabas. Others said we don't know who wrote it. Some people said it was written by Barnabas. Others said we don't know who wrote it. Like, in other words, there was discrepancies in the tradition because when you have an anonymous book, people are going to speculate about who wrote it and they're going to have different opinions. That's exactly what we don't find with the four gospels. It's unanimous. And I don't know if this is a good point or not, but if you're trying to give your gospels credibility so you come up with a name, why not choose like a better person than Mark or Luke?

Starting point is 00:33:10 Why not choose Jesus or Peter? Yeah, this is another problem with the anonymous theory. It doesn't make any sense. Why would you choose non-eyewitnesses like Mark or Luke to ascribe the books to. I mean, in other words, if you're sitting in front of a blank, a book with no title and it's 190 AD and you can ascribe it to anyone you want and you want to give it authority, are you going to go for this guy, Luke, a Gentile who never met Jesus and who traveled around with Jesus, I mean, with Paul for a little while? Or are you going to ascribe it to Mark, this guy who wasn't one of the 12, he wasn't an apostle, he was just a companion of Peter? That doesn't make any sense. Why not just say the gospel according to Peter? Or for that matter,

Starting point is 00:33:48 if you really want your book to hit, you know, really good Amazon sales. New York Times bestseller. Yeah, New York Times bestseller, say the gospel of Jesus himself, right? I mean, just go straight to the top, attribute it to Jesus himself. But that's not what we find, right? What happens with the gospels is two of them are attributed to non-eyewitnesses, which only makes sense if those non-eyewitnesses are, in fact, the authors. Okay, so we've got no reason to think that anonymous authors wrote the Gospels. Some people will say, though, but they were written very late after the life of

Starting point is 00:34:25 Christ and therefore are unreliable. Can you speak to that? Yeah, okay, so sometime, another thing, scholars like Ehrman, for example, he will say, he'll call it the problem of the time gap. That's what he says, the time gap. What he'll say is, look how much time has passed between the events of Jesus' life and death, which is around 30 AD, and then the standard scholarly dates. So a very common date for the Gospels is that Mark was written around 70 AD and that Matthew and Luke were written in the 80s of the first century, and then that John is last sometime in the 90s. Okay, so between 70 and 90 AD. One of the things that Ehrman and skeptical scholars will point out is, you know, look how many decades have passed, right? This is over 40 years since the events themselves happened, right? And what they'll say is, there's no way for us to know if these accounts are reliable because so much time has passed,

Starting point is 00:35:27 especially, think about this, if they were really anonymous. Then you've got, you don't even know who wrote these things, and over 40 years have passed. How can we expect the memories of the authors to be reliable when I can't remember what I did yesterday, right? I mean, you know, we all make mistakes with our memory. So why would we think that the gospel authors are reliable after such a long period of time? As someone who's never studied this formally or hasn't really thought about this a great deal, so just as a layman, that strikes me as not a good argument. Because I can, like, even if that's true, I can remember prominent events that happened to me 20 years ago.

Starting point is 00:36:11 Like, if I was in a boat and a man started walking on the water towards me, that's not something I'd forget in 40 years. Like, maybe you can't argue for the inerrancy of Scripture, but at least the general reliability of it. Like, if a man comes back from the dead, I'd remember that. Yeah, well, see, notice what you just did, Matt. You went back to the idea of it actually being something you witnessed. That's why the anonymity theory is really the linchpin. Once you pull that out, the whole thing comes crashing down. So the date only really becomes an issue if the books were anonymous and it's stories about Jesus being transmitted over three or four decades.

Starting point is 00:36:44 But if they're actually written by eyewitnesses and apostles or companions of eyewitnesses, people who had access like Luke, then even the late first century dates of the gospel don't really cause a problem because they're still within the living memory of the events themselves. So let me just give a couple of reasons to think about this. First, if you look at the kinds of memories that are in the Gospels, if they're actually written by, let's say, Matthew and John, even if, and we could debate the dates later, but even if Matthew's writing it 30 or 40 years later, you have to realize here, these are not what we might call incidental memories. These are what scholars refer to as skilled memories or trained memories, because they're

Starting point is 00:37:32 the memories of Jesus's students, right? This is not like you happen to witness a car accident and the officer says, you know, what was the man wearing? What color was the car? You know, a kind of incidental encounter here. No, no, no. These disciples lived with Jesus. They ate with Jesus. They listened to him preach in city after city, day after day for three years before he died and rose again. And then they would have spent the next three decades talking about, guess what? Jesus, right? I mean, you think about it. Even today, if you know somebody famous and people know you know somebody famous, what do they do? They ask you, oh, tell us about that. Oh, Aunt Joan, you dated Elvis? Tell us about that,

Starting point is 00:38:16 the date you went on with Elvis, right? And she's going to be telling that story for the rest of her life if she actually did that. Well, same thing's true with the apostles here. It isn't just that they have the skilled memory of students, but they also would have what scholars call rehearsed memories because they would have spent the rest of their lives telling the stories of what Jesus did. And that would have reified and reinforced those memories in their minds so that even if they wrote the gospospels toward the end of their life, that would not in any way take away from the substantial reliability of their accounts. It's just like saying today, if I interviewed Elie Wiesel, right, who survived the Holocaust,

Starting point is 00:38:58 if I interviewed him in the 80s about what happened in the Holocaust in the 1940s, right, do you think anyone's going to say, oh, we can't trust Elie Wiesel? It's been four decades since the Holocaust. Would anybody say that? No, of course not, because these are transformative events. These are the kind of memories that stamp your brain and never go away, especially if you spend the rest of your life talking about it. So that's the kind of memories we have in the Gospels. Yeah. And that said, I'm sure people will hear that and be, okay, yeah, maybe, but there are differences in the words of Christ, say from Luke and Matthew. So either both are wrong, or at least one is wrong. Great. So what do we do with the differences in the Gospels? I like to point out, and this is a really great question,

Starting point is 00:39:44 the differences in the Gospels? I like to point out, and this is a really great question, is yes, there are differences in the Gospels, because when human beings tell stories and they give their own accounts of certain events, we do it differently. In fact, even when one individual gives an account on multiple occasions of the same event. We do it differently. We use different words. So I think it's really important for readers to recognize a couple things. First, that while the Gospels are biographies and they are based on eyewitness testimony, they are not verbatim transcripts of what Jesus did and said, because it wasn't expected in the ancient world that you would write a verbatim transcript, okay? That's the difference between like a court stenographer who's going to take things down word for word, and then a normal person recounting an event that they experienced in their life in which they might paraphrase things, they might synthesize things, they might recount someone

Starting point is 00:40:45 else's words in their own words, but with the attempt to be faithful to what the historical truth of what actually happened. So the classic example of this is, of course, the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, right? So if you look at Matthew and Mark and Luke, you're going to see that the way they recount Jesus's words of institution over the cup and the bread are not identical. They're not verbatim, right? However, as Pope Benedict has pointed out in his book on Jesus of Nazareth, they are substantially the same. In other words, in all four accounts, all three accounts, Jesus takes a cup of wine and says it's his blood of the covenant and that they have to drink it. And he takes bread and says that it is his body and it's being broken for us. Yes, they use different words and not

Starting point is 00:41:30 exactly the same, but they are substantially the same. And that's always what we've believed about the gospels, that they are substantially reliable, that the substance is in accordance with the historical truth of the event. In other words, we can't demand of the Gospels a level of precision that we don't demand of one another in common speech, because the Gospels as ancient biographies weren't even aiming for the kind of verbatim transcripts that we can do today through recording equipment. Yeah, yeah. So, inerrancy doesn't mean verbatim then, because I think that's what a lot of people kind of think when they say, okay, the church

Starting point is 00:42:08 says the Bible's inerrant, therefore it has to be word for word. And if it's not word for word, then they didn't get it exactly right, and therefore, you know. Yes, that is a modern assumption and a modern problem. It's like, what am I going to do? Am I going to put a parenthesis and say cough?

Starting point is 00:42:24 That's where Jesus coughed, and then he mumbled a few words, which I didn't quite get. So I'm going to somehow put that down. Yeah. Well, not just that. I'll go one further. One of the reasons we get misled is because we have quotation marks in our Bibles, right? And your English Bible has quotation marks. And when we use quotation marks in contemporary English, it means that we're quoting someone word for word, but there were no quotation marks in the original Greek because they didn't exist. They don't have quotation marks in Greek. So even just little differences like that can give us an impression of verbatim accounts, which ancients would not have had. They would have understood that an evangelist here is going to give the substance of what Jesus did and said, but it doesn't have to be a verbatim transcript.

Starting point is 00:43:11 And so when the church says that the gospels are inerrant or that they are free from error, that they teach the truth, the church has always meant that they teach the truth in accordance with the genre of the book, right? That they, in other words, according to the intentions of the author. And if we go back, I have a whole chapter on this in the case of Jesus, and we compare the gospels, we can see that the gospels are not modern biographies that are going to use verbatim quotes, you know, from documentation. They are ancient biographies that would aim to give the reader the substance of what Jesus didn't say, but really what he didn't say. It is still the truth. It's just, it's according to the genre of ancient biography. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That, that, that really does, that clears it up in a way that hasn't been clear to me before. Yeah. Cause in the past,

Starting point is 00:44:00 I've heard people say, well, Jesus was an itinerant preacher. And so when Jesus gives the Beatitudes, you know, and it's recorded in Matthew and recorded in Luke, the reason they're different might be because he said the same thing in two different places. But you can't really say that when it comes to the Last Supper. Yeah, that's a great analogy. That can be true of certain stories of Jesus, like maybe parables. He might spin it a little differently in one town than he does it in another. I mean, Matt, you're a public speaker. You know that. Is this right or not? Yeah. Can you give the same talk in different towns, but do it a little different each time, depending on the audience? Of course. Yeah. Of course. And not only can you, a good speaker does that intuitively and instinctively, right? I mean, I could tell you right now, right now,

Starting point is 00:44:44 I could give you an hour-long lecture on the Jewish roots of the Eucharist because I've done it a hundred times. And 80% of it would be almost identical to what I've done the other hundred times. But the 20%, well, I might change things up a bit, you know? So that works for some of Jesus's sayings, but it doesn't work for all of them.

Starting point is 00:45:01 So what we really have to look at is what the evangelists themselves are trying to do. And if you don't mind, I'll actually quote, listen to the opening lines of Luke's gospel, just to kind of give a hard example from the text itself, right? And I want you to ask yourself, as I read these words to you, does this sound like Luke is beginning a collection of folk tales about Jesus, a telephone game, a myth, or is he giving us a biography that aims at the truth? Luke began his gospel this way. I'm quoting Luke 1, verse 1 to 4. In as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.

Starting point is 00:45:47 It seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an accurate account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. And then he begins the gospel. Notice what he just said. I'm going to give you a gospel that's number one, based on eyewitnesses, right? Is that the kind of thing when you say before you begin, you know, the story of the three little pigs? I don't think so. No, right? Secondly, I'm going to give an accurate and orderly account for you. And third, I'm going to

Starting point is 00:46:21 tell you the truth concerning what Jesus did and said. So that's what we're looking for. We go to the Gospels, accuracy, eyewitness testimony, and historical truth. He doesn't begin a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. No, that's right. And he doesn't say once upon a time. He gives the reader, the ancient reader, the clue to the genre of the book at the beginning, which is where you usually do this. This, what I'm about to tell you is the historical truth based on eyewitness testimony. All right, awesome. Well, thank you so much. Talk a little bit about the Gospels and how they are better attested than any other historical document, because the first time I learned that,

Starting point is 00:46:56 I nearly fell off my chair. I couldn't believe it. Yeah, no, this is a really interesting point. It kind of brings us back to earlier, the whole issue of the manuscript evidence. You might say, well, maybe some manuscripts say Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote them, but how many manuscripts do we actually have? Well, the reality is we have hundreds of ancient Greek manuscripts of the gospel and thousands of ancient manuscripts of the gospel in different languages. And when you compare that to what we have for other ancient writings, like Caesar's Gallic Wars or Homer's Odyssey or Iliad, they don't even hold a candle to the manuscript evidence for the gospels. When you look at other ancient writings from the

Starting point is 00:47:38 Greek and Roman authors, a lot of times we'll have five copies, two copies, 10 copies. And most of those manuscripts are from the middle ages or late middle ages, right? Whereas when it comes to the gospels, we've got hundreds of copies from the second century, third century, fourth century, fifth century, um, within, you know, within, uh, just one to two, three centuries of the actual writings themselves. Now today we might think, oh, that's a long time. But if you study any ancient history at all, you're going to be blown away by the manuscript evidence. It is so much more for the New Testament than it is for any other ancient book, precisely because the New Testament was the most important book in ancient and then in medieval Christianity where the scribes were preserving these works. So again,

Starting point is 00:48:23 if you're going to cast doubt on the gospel manuscripts, you have to throw out all of the other ancient historical writings, the writings of Caesar or Plato or Aristotle. All those works are nowhere closely, are nowhere close to the manuscript attestations we have for the New Testament. Right, which means we can then kind of compare and contrast these Gospels with each other to see if there are any major discrepancies, right? I mean, that's one of the good things about having many copies. That's exactly right. And look, again, we were just talking about verbatim issues

Starting point is 00:48:58 or issues of details and discrepancies between the Gospels. Anyone who sat down and read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in order straight through is not going to be struck by the little differences and details. You're going to be struck by the similarities, right? I mean, that's why they call Matthew, Mark, and Luke the synoptic gospels, because they look so similar. They see things through the same optic, through the same lens. And so what stands out in the gospel accounts is not the differences. It's the similarities. In all of the gospels,

Starting point is 00:49:28 Jesus is identified as Messiah, performs miracles, walks on water, feeds 5,000 people. We have multiple attestation for his virginal conception and importantly, multiple attestation for him

Starting point is 00:49:43 claiming to be God. This is one of the things I tried to point out in the... Yeah, that's where I want to go next here. So, if the words of Jesus, if the life of Jesus has been recorded faithfully, then, yeah, then it looks like we come back to the trilemma.

Starting point is 00:49:59 So, where does Jesus claim to be God, and what do you say to the claim? I think Ehrman says this a lot, that sure, he's divine in the Gospel of John, but that was written much later. And by that time, the myths had kind of developed, but you don't see that in the synoptics. Great question. Yeah, so the way I would respond to that claim by Ehrman is real simple. It would be this. Yes, Jesus does in fact claim to be God in the synoptic Gospels, but he does it in a Jewish way using parables and riddles and questions that are meant to challenge his audience and lead them to faith in him.

Starting point is 00:50:37 So let me give you a couple of examples here. One of my favorite ones is from the beginning of Mark's gospel, when Jesus heals the paralytic. You remember that story? Yeah, sure. And so he goes in, they bring him a paralytic, they let him down through the roof, and Jesus says to the man, my son, your sins are forgiven. Now, if I were the paralytic, I have to say, I might be thinking, okay, that's nice, but that's not what I came here for, right? You know, I've noticed, but I'm paralyzed. Could you heal me, right? What's interesting about that is how the Jewish people around Jesus react. What they say is, why does this man speak thus? It is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone, right? Now, they recognize that only God has the authority to forgive sins. Any first

Starting point is 00:51:24 century Jew would have known that. And then notice how Jesus responds. He doesn't say, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm sorry. You got me wrong. You misconstrued the implications of what I just said. Right. Instead, what he says is that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins.

Starting point is 00:51:43 I say to you, rise, take up your pallet, and walk. In other words, what Jesus says is, which is easier, the visible miracle of making a person stand up, or the invisible miracle of saying your sins are forgiven, of forgiving his sins? So what he says is, so that you know I have the authority to do the invisible miracle of forgiving his sins, something only God

Starting point is 00:52:06 can do, I will perform the visible miracle of making him walk. And so he says, rise, take up your pallet and walk, and the guy walks off, right? So what's the implication of that miracle? Jesus is confirming that he can do what only God does, namely forgive sins. And he proves it by making a lame man walk. Yeah, and when Jewish scholars read this, is that how they interpret it? I mean, was it really as shocking to those people who surrounded him at the time as we want to make it sound like it is today? Yeah, that's a great question. I have to go back and look at particular Jewish scholars.

Starting point is 00:52:44 Yeah, Benedict talks about this a little bit, you know, when he says something greater than the Sabbath is here. That's right, yes. He's talking about Jacob Neusner, who was a Jewish scholar who recently died. I'd have to go back and look and see if Neusner said anything about Mark chapter 2. But yes, Pope Benedict pointed out that in another place in Matthew, when Jesus says something greater than the temple is here, another place in Matthew, when Jesus says something greater than the temple is here, Neusner and other Jews would have recognized that for a Jew in the first century, the only thing greater than the temple, which was God's dwelling place on earth, would be God himself coming down present among his people. So when Jesus says something greater than the temple is here,

Starting point is 00:53:21 there's only one reaction to that. What in the world are you saying? Are you claiming to be divine? Because only God himself would be greater than the temple. But notice what Jesus does. It's like a riddle. It's a parable. It's meant to lead you to faith in him. He doesn't go around explicitly declaring, I am God, right off the bat, for one thing, that would have got him executed. But on a deeper level, Matt, I think it's also because he wants us to come to faith in him. He wants us to enter into the mystery of his divine identity. So he's going to gradually reveal that awesome mystery to people in his public ministry. But from the beginning of Mark's gospel, right, which most scholars like Ehrman would say, this is the earliest gospel. In chapter two, he's already being accused of blasphemy for claiming to do something that God alone can do.

Starting point is 00:54:10 What does Jesus mean when he calls himself the son of man? Oh, this is a great question. I love how excited you get about this stuff. Yeah, no, it's cool. You know, look, if you can't get excited about Jesus, what are you going to get excited about? Exactly. No, so, well, the son of man is one of those, it's another one of those riddles, okay? It's got like a double meaning.

Starting point is 00:54:30 On the one hand, Son of Man can just be used in the Bible to refer to a human being. Like in Psalm 8, where it says, you know, what is the Son of Man, Lord, that you're mindful of him? In other words, how do you take account of mere human beings? So on the one hand, son of man just means a human being. On the other hand, in the Old Testament book of Daniel, the son of man is this mysterious heavenly being who comes on the clouds as if he's a divine figure, because in the Old Testament, God rides on the clouds, and it says he came on the clouds of heaven and was like a son of man. So, he's a heavenly being who looks like a human and who comes to the ancient of days and receives this everlasting kingdom so that all people's tribes

Starting point is 00:55:17 and tongues will worship him, will honor him, and he'll be king over this everlasting kingdom. So, what happens is Jesus takes that expression, the Son of Man, and he refers to himself in the Gospels over and over again in the third person. And it's kind of weird because on the one hand, it can just mean a human being, but when Jesus puts a definite article in front of it like the Son of Man, he is clearly alluding to the Son of Man in the book of Daniel, this heavenly figure, who one Jewish scholar, Daniel Boyar, and he taught at Yale for years, he says the son of man in the book of Daniel is divine because he's riding on the clouds of heaven and because people

Starting point is 00:55:58 are worshiping him, something done only to God alone. Now, if Jesus picks that guy to refer to himself as, and if you read through the gospels, Jesus' favorite way of referring to himself is the son of man, then also, once again, what is he doing? He's revealing that he's not just fully human, he's also divine, but he's doing it in a Jewish way by alluding to the Jewish scriptures and showing he's the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Right. I think when many people read I'm the son of man, they think he's saying, hey, I'm just a dude like you. But how do people respond to him when he says I am the son of man? Well, OK, that's a great question. To look at that, you have to look at the end of Mark's gospel.

Starting point is 00:56:41 This is another real problem for scholars like Ehrman. You know, they'll say, well, Jesus never claimed to be divine in the earliest gospel of Mark. And my response to that is, well, then why is he accused of blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity at the trial before the Sanhedrin? Right? Yeah. I mean, this is a really, this is a really, really momentous point. So if you skip ahead to verse to chapter 14 and the end of the gospel, Mark, you'll remember Jesus goes before the Jewish Sanhedrin, which was like the high priestly council. And they're trying to bring up a charge against him. You know, some people say he was going to destroy the temple and whatnot. And finally, the high priest just cuts through all of that and says, tell us, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed?

Starting point is 00:57:26 through all of that and says, tell us, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed? And Jesus says in response, I am, and you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven. And how does the high priest respond to that, Matt? Do you remember? Yeah. He's like, okay, sweet. You're nuts. No, he rips his garments. Yeah. No, he tears his garments and he says, we don't need any more witnesses. You have heard his blasphemy. What's your decision? And they all say he deserves to die. Now, I actually asked Bart Ehrman this once in a public context. I was at a lecture he was given and I asked him, I said, you just told everyone here that Jesus never claims to be divine in the Gospel of Mark. Well, if he never claims to be divine, then why does the high priest accuse him of blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity?

Starting point is 00:58:18 And he said? Well, this is important because it wasn't blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah. Okay. Because the Messiah is just the king of Israel. He's the long-awaited king. David is called Messiah in the Old Testament. Messiah just means anointed king. Okay.

Starting point is 00:58:34 It isn't blasphemy to claim to be the king if you are the king. What would it be? What would it be if you weren't the Messiah and you said you were? Well, then it'd be false witness. You'd be just saying, you'd be lying about yourself, okay? But it's not blasphemy, okay. No, it's not blasphemy.

Starting point is 00:58:51 Yeah, if the high priest said, we've all heard him bear false witness, that would be different. But that's not what the high priest said. We've heard his blasphemy. What did Ehrman say, though, when you pointed that out? Well, he talked,

Starting point is 00:59:02 he kind of backed it up and he talked around it for just about two minutes, and at the end he said, well, does Jesus claim to be divine in Mark? Yeah, kind of. I guess he does. He actually admits it at the end, because he recognized, but what he says is that that didn't happen. Mm-hmm. Okay. So he pulls the legend argument. Yeah, there you go.

Starting point is 00:59:25 As you say, it's the linchpin. Exactly. Doesn't matter anyway. All right. Yeah, he does claim to be divine in the trial, but we know that the trial didn't happen. So we don't, that doesn't constitute evidence that Jesus claimed to be God. I don't know how you feel about public debates, but have you reached out to Ehrman? No, no, I haven't reached out.

Starting point is 00:59:44 I've just been really, yeah. Well I haven't reached out. I'm just been really, yeah. Well, okay. Full disclosure. I'm just so busy. I'm not interested in doing debates. I really have like three or four books I'm trying to write to do debates after I get the books written. He's quite good on his feet though. He's a very good speaker. You can actually, there's actually a YouTube video of my question to him. Somebody took a clip of it and said Bart Ehrman stumbles into the divinity of Jesus in Mars. I'm going to put that up in the show notes for our listeners. Well, to his credit, he was honest about it. Like he admits, yes, that the best explanation of that answer is that Jesus is claiming to be divine.

Starting point is 01:00:19 But the problem is he says, well, we have no way of knowing what happened in the trial because we don't have any witnesses from that trial. And to that, I would say that false. That's not true. For one thing, we Joseph Amorthea was a member of the Sanhedrin and a believer in Jesus. Right. Yeah. And second, Peter's in the courtyard. You don't think people are talking about what they say? I mean, come on. It's just not it's not reasonable to believe that we have no access to it.

Starting point is 01:00:50 Also, it falsifies the argument. His main argument is Jesus doesn't claim to be divine in the synoptics, and Mark's testimony in the trial shows that that's just false. So I've got about three more questions I want to ask you. I'm so thankful for all the time you're giving me. I could talk to you all day, but I understand you probably have a life and a wife and family. No, no, no, it's okay. I'm probably going too fast, but I'm just trying to—

Starting point is 01:01:10 Oh, I'm loving this so much. Gosh, this is awesome. This is why we need a pint in front of us right now. If it weren't the morning time, maybe we would. It's a little early, but okay. I love what—it was hilarious what you said about, did Christ know he was God? was hilarious what you said about, did Christ know he was God? I remember going to Taizé in France, and that was one of the, you know, open-minded questions that we were asked to reflect upon, like, Jesus, did he know he was God? Maybe not. Please tell us your fantastic

Starting point is 01:01:36 story about Jesus walking on the water. Yeah, okay, so in Mark, in fact, in all four, well, not all four, Matthew, Mark, and John, three out of the four gospels tell us that Jesus not only walked on the water, on the Sea of Galilee, but that when he encountered the disciples and they were afraid, what he said to them was, don't be afraid, I am. In Greek, the Greek there is ego, a me. am. In Greek, the Greek there is ego, a me. And what's remarkable about that, if you're, again, if you're a Jew and you know the Old Testament, you'll know that who else in the Bible says, I am, without a predicate like that. It is God himself in Exodus 3, when he reveals his identity to Moses and says, I am who I am, right? In other words, I am he who is. I am the God of the universe. I am the eternal God. I'm the God who made the heaven and the earth. Well, Jesus takes that divine name and he reveals it to the disciples as he is walking on the Sea of Galilee,

Starting point is 01:02:38 right? And in Matthew's gospel, it says they fall down on their face and they worship him, and he doesn't stop them either, right? So, one of the things I love to point to is that in our day and time, it's become very popular, especially in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, in certain Catholic circles to say, well, maybe Jesus was divine, but did he know he was God? And I always like to point to the walking on the water as a reputation of that, because it's fascinating if you look at John's gospel, he adds one detail. He tells us that when Jesus was on the water, that he had gone about four miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Now, the Sea of Galilee is about seven miles wide at its widest point, right? And if you go get in a boat sometime and travel four miles out from the shore. That's a long way to walk on the water. So what

Starting point is 01:03:27 I love to tell my students is, look, if Jesus didn't know he was divine at mile one, I bet, I bet he had it figured out by mile four, right? Like, Hey, you know, I'm, uh, I'm different from other people. Yeah. Not like all the other kids, right? I mean, come on. The whole point. That's so good. And Ehrman will say that too. He would respond by saying, oh, when Jesus says I am, he just means it's me. He doesn't, he's not making a divine claim.

Starting point is 01:03:56 Yeah. Other people will say I am in certain contexts. That's right. Like answering a question. And my response to that is always, yes, it's true. The expression, I am in some context can just mean it's me. But what is the context here? He's walking on water, man. Right. He's not just saying I am in any context. He's revealing his divine power as he's engaging in a divine act. In fact, if you look at the book of Job,

Starting point is 01:04:26 I think it's chapter 8, in the Greek translation of Job, it says that God alone walks on the waves as if on dry ground. Now, do you think Jesus knows the book of Job? Probably, since he's a good Jew. Yeah, probably. Do you think the apostles know the book of Job? Yeah, probably. So in other words, he's performing a miracle that alludes to the Old Testament, things that only God can do in the Old Testament. And in that context, he's taking the divine name from the Old Testament. All of this is meant to reveal he isn't just some prophet. He isn't just some teacher. He isn't even just the Messiah, the long-awaited king. He is the same God who appeared to Moses in the Exodus, the same God that Job says alone could

Starting point is 01:05:12 walk on the waves. He is now that God become man, come in the flesh as the son of man to save us from sin and save us from death. Glory to God. Hey, one of my patrons, Philip Haddon, asks a question. He says, this is a little off topic, but what do historians and theologians know about St. Paul's understanding of Judaism? Is his writings influenced more of Hellenistic thought, Second Temple Judaism? What rabbinic school is he more influenced by in his New Testament writings? Oh, wow. Well, we could do a whole show just on that. What I would say in a nutshell is Paul is a man of three different worlds all coming together. He is a Jew, first and foremost,

Starting point is 01:05:57 who is influenced by the Jewish scriptures and by Pharisee. Nice ringtone. Yeah, sorry about that. That's okay. Amateur faux pas on the guy here. It's fun. So first, he's a Jew. And not just any kind of Jew, he's a Pharisee. So to answer his question, he would have been influenced by the sect of Jews known as the Pharisees, who reverenced both scripture and tradition, and who believed in the resurrection and the final judgment. But Paul is also a Greek

Starting point is 01:06:25 speaking Pharisee. So his mind and his world would have been influenced by the Greek language, because that's the language all his letters are written in. And then finally, third, he's a Roman citizen. So he's a Greek speaking Jew who lives in the world of the Roman empire. So you have to take all three of those into account. It's not an either or. Paul's not either Greek or Jewish. It's both and because he's living in this multicultural environment that the Roman Empire had made possible. And it's precisely in that environment that as a Jew, he's going to bring the truth of the Jewish scriptures, which are now in Greek, to the Greco-Roman world by proclaiming the Messiah, not just for the Jews, but for the Greeks as well. Okay. I think the reason Philip's asking this is he's been hearing new arguments lately about Paul's teaching and understandings contradicting Christ's teachings in the Gospels. Is this something you're seeing? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Well, again, that would

Starting point is 01:07:21 actually take a whole show to really flesh it all out. What I would say is this. From the very beginning, if you go back to 2 Peter, it says there are some things in Paul's letters hard to understand. Paul is tough, and he can be interpreted in a whole host of different ways. In fact, it was the interpretation of Paul that split Christendom at the time of the Protestant Reformation. So I would have to know which passages, which scholars, who's saying that, and which claims are being made precisely about where Paul contradicts Jesus before I could really address it. What I would say, though, is Paul is building on what we find in the Gospels, but he's looking at it from the other side of the resurrection. So Jesus is preparing people for what's going to happen in his passion, death, and resurrection.

Starting point is 01:08:08 Paul's letters are on the other side of that event and theologizing about the implications of what has already happened in his passion, death, and resurrection. And that does mean there are going to be some real differences in vantage point between Jesus and Paul. All right, terrific. Let's finish with one final, very practical question. How can we love Holy Scripture more? Okay, I'll be honest with you. The main thing you need to do is immerse yourself in it by reading it every single day. That's the most important thing. You know, Jesus says, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God in Matthew chapter four.

Starting point is 01:08:51 And if you think about it, every one of us, what's the first thing you do when you get up in the morning, you go and you look to have some food, right? Breakfast. We all eat breakfast every single day, right? So we take the bread that gives us life and nourishment every day. Do we do the same thing with the gospels, with the word of God, with the scriptures? Jesus says that we don't live by bread alone, but by the word of God. Well, if that's the case, if he's drawing that analogy with food, then it needs to be something we're consuming every single day. Because if you don't eat every day, guess what's going to happen? You're going to get weak. You're going to get sick. And if you stop eating completely,

Starting point is 01:09:29 eventually you're going to die, right? Well, the same thing holds for the Word of Scripture, right? If we don't consume the Word of God on a regular basis every day, and I'd say multiple times a day, what's going to happen spiritually? How do you do it? Do you wake up in the morning and read scripture? Because when I wake up in the morning, I'm exhausted. I just want coffee. I don't feel any particular way, nor do I think I need to feel a particular way to have coffee. But I think sometimes what prevents me from diving into the scriptures first thing is I'm just not in the mood and I can't give the reverence I think I ought to give to it while my kids are running around and life is chaotic. Maybe I'm wrong to let how I feel prevent me from diving in right away. Absolutely. And, you know, so two things. First, just as a very

Starting point is 01:10:20 important point, scripture and coffee consumption are not antithetical. They can go together. Right. If you need the coffee to wake you up before you begin to read, go for it. All right. But I would say my own personal spiritual regimen is, yes, every day. The first thing I do in the morning is go to prayer. And my main subject of meditation is always some passage of scripture. So right now I'm working through the book of Acts, just taking a chapter each morning. Sit there, read it, chew it, meditate on it, think about it, talk to God about it, talk to the Lord about it. And that way you're always even if it's just a little bit, Matt, it doesn't have to be a lot with Scripture. Just do it.

Starting point is 01:11:06 Yeah, just do it. I mean, look, it takes, what, three to five minutes to read any chapter of any book of the New Testament. I think that maybe we don't pray for the, maybe we don't read the Bible for the same reason we don't pray. It just feels unproductive and boring. Yeah, but it's only unproductive and boring, I think, if you don't realize who you're talking to. That's right. Right? I think you're talking to. That's right. Right? I think you're spot on.

Starting point is 01:11:27 Because the Bible is not just some thing. It's the words of someone. It's the one who made us. And so if we really encounter it as not just man's word but God's word, he's always going to have something there for you. And even if you don't have some blinding insight, the reality is he might be telling you something in that reading that you'll need a year from now. That's awesome. Or a week from now. I was just thinking, here's something I think I might begin implementing in my life, right?

Starting point is 01:11:52 I will only drink coffee if I read scripture while I'm doing it. Bring two wonderful things together. If I was to tie those things together, it's like, am I really going to be like, well, I don't want to have coffee because, you know. Yeah, right. There you go. Yeah. And look, again, it doesn't have to be a lot, but even a little bit in the morning. For me personally, it's like an essential. Yeah. I just, and you know, what happens to that is that over time you're going to realize, wow, I've read a lot of scripture. If you read one chapter a day, you're going to get through a lot of scripture. How can we learn more from you? Where's your stuff online? How do we buy your stuff? Because I know a lot of people are just looking for somebody to break this open. And unfortunately, until recently, it felt like,

Starting point is 01:12:33 oh, we had with these, you know, wonderful, no doubt, Protestant and evangelicals who were better examples than most of our Catholic teachers on this. Yeah, we've had a real renewal of Catholic biblical scholarship. And I've tried to play my little role, my own little part in that. So if you want to find out more about my resources, you can go to my website. It's www.brantpitre.com. That's B-R-A-N-T-P-I-T-R-E.com. And there, Matt, first of all, I have a handful of different books, like The Case for Jesus that I've written. I've written a book called Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, which is all about the scriptural foundation of the Eucharist. I've got a new one coming out.

Starting point is 01:13:14 I'd love to do an interview with you on that at some point called Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary. It's on the biblical roots of our beliefs about Mary and where they come from in Jewish scripture and tradition. But also, man, I've got about, I guess, 30 to 40 different Bible studies there. Really? Yeah, audio, video, digital. You can listen to it. You can watch it on CD, listen on CD, watch it on DVD, do a digital download, whatever medium you use. I've been doing that for about 12 years now.

Starting point is 01:13:44 And so I've got Bible studies on Genesis, Exodus, whatever medium you use. I've been doing that for about 12 years now. And so I've got Bible studies on Genesis, Exodus, the Gospels. I've got a whole course. I'm on your site right now. It's a very beautiful site, very easy to navigate. So you're saying all of these Bible studies, I don't just have to buy a CD. I can even download the MP3. You can download them, exactly. MP3, yep, right there at brantpetrie..com i've got a whole course on spiritual life where i talk about lexio divina kind of what we were just talking about praying the scripture so yeah um it's all there if uh even if maybe you don't want to read the book version of the case for jesus maybe you'd like to listen to a lecture version of it i have i have about a i guess it's about a

Starting point is 01:14:19 20 hour version where i just take you through in a lecture format these are lectures i gave in classes where we recorded them. And if you want to listen, so if you're more of a tapeworm than a bookworm, you can listen. And if you want to watch it, you can watch it. We have videos as well. So all different meetings. What is autographed books?

Starting point is 01:14:35 Do you actually sign the ones that you send out? I actually sign the ones you send out. On an autograph, it's right there at our website, brantpetrie.com. My false humility whenever I sign someone's book and feel awkward about it. you can it's right there at our website brandtpetrie.com uh so my uh my uh my false humility whenever i sign someone's book and feel awkward about it you know i always say it'll be worth more in the garage sale but no one's giving your books away yeah it is it is one of those things a little embarrassing but people like it they'd like to have a connection with the author and i'm happy to to serve if that makes it fun for people there it goes again hey very finally

Starting point is 01:15:03 do you know that do you know who dr. William A. Craig is, of course? Yeah, sure. Do you know that he mentioned you in a Facebook video? Oh, really? Yeah. I'm so glad that I get to tell you this. Oh, wow, that's really cool. Yeah, he's a widely respected Protestant evangelist and scholar.

Starting point is 01:15:21 Yeah, he's been doing this for decades. I forget in what respect he brought you up, but it was in a little Facebook video. I saw it about a year ago, and I remember because he said, Dr. – he said, Brent Petraire or something like that. And he referred to something. I'm like, we have Dr. William Lane Craig referencing our Catholic scholars. This is a glorious day. Somebody might have told me about – I think it's about my book on The Last Supper last supper where I talk about the date of the last supper and whether the gospels contradict one

Starting point is 01:15:49 another on the last supper. I think that might've been it. Cause one of the things he does work with, if I'm not mistaken, is the question of the truth of the gospels, like inspiration and inerrancy issues, you know, apparent contradictions and that kind of thing. So I deal with that as well. In some of my terrific, Hey, I'm glad you exist and that you're doing what you're doing. Thank you for the work that you're doing on behalf of everyone listening right now. Thank you so much. And thanks for taking the time to be on Pints with Aquinas. It was my pleasure. I hope maybe we can do this again. It was a lot of fun. I would love that. Thanks.

Starting point is 01:16:19 Yo, thanks so much for listening to Pints with Aquinas this week. Remember, we're doing a promotion all month. If you give $10 or more over Patreon by going to pintswithaquinas.com and clicking donate, I will send you a signed copy of my book, a Pints with Aquinas sticker. You get an exclusive Aquinas magnet for the back of your car that you can't get and won't be able to get anywhere else ever. That's pretty special. You'll also be in the running to win one of three five-volume sets of the Summa Theologiae. As I say, we're doing a lot more work here at Pints with Aquinas,

Starting point is 01:16:54 producing video content, books, mission trips, and we just want more support. We have people who are quitting every month, and we need people to fill those shoes. It's weird, isn't it? Shoes? Sandals? Anyway, again, go to pintswithaquinas.com and click donate to get all that cool free stuff and to feel just like a really great human being. Okay, bye.

Starting point is 01:17:18 Seriously, go.

Pints With Aquinas - 132: Did Jesus really claim to be God? With Brant Pitre

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